The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects global oil demand will increase by 11 million barrels per day by 2040, driven mostly by a 30 percent increase in Asia. That even incorporates the growth of electric vehicles, because most of the increased oil demand will come from petrochemical manufacturing. The data from just China and India ? the world’s largest and third-largest energy consumers, respectively ? are stunning. China’s total energy consumption from all sources in 2017 was roughly 23 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Non-hydro renewables in China accounted for the equivalent of about 782 million barrels of oil in 2017, or around 3.4 percent of China’s total energy consumption. The world’s second most populous country, India, is also driving global oil and gas demand. Even though renewables had double-digit growth in India from 2016 to 2017, the country’s dependence on fossil fuels was unchanged. In 2016, renewables accounted for 2.5 percent of all primary energy use in India. In 2017, they were 2.9 percent. Oil delivers 10 times more energy for India than renewables. The country will more than double its oil use by 2035, making it the fastest growing oil consumer in the world. India gets twice as much energy from natural gas than renewables. Growing global energy demand will require a diverse set of resources and approaches, including fossil fuels, renewables, and efficiency. And to be sure, the recent growth in renewables has been impressive. But amidst discussions about the so-called Green New Deal and as activists paint a rosy picture about transitioning to 100 percent renewables within 10 years, it is more important than ever to focus on data over political slogans.

North Korea’s first test of a nuclear device was in 2006, and over the next 10 years they conducted four more. These were fission tests, with relatively low yields ? although increasing. And in all probability they were test devices, not weapons. Their sixth test, in September 2017, surprised the world. It was a high-yield thermonuclear device. Now they were ready for weaponizing and production. North Korea started developing missiles for nuke delivery years earlier, but it was slow work initially short-range, then intermediate-range, with many failures. But in July 2017 they had their first two successes with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Now missiles also were ready. All they needed was time for integration and production. For the United States, also, time was critical. There could be no delay. We must launch a hard, sustained series of conventional strikes to denuclearize as much of North Korea as possible. If we moved fast enough, North Korea might not be able to make any nuclear response. At this point, Kim Jong-un ? trained by his father and grandfather since birth ? proposed to the United States that the Korean peninsula be denuclearized. His proposal has already gained him a year. Only the future knows what the outcome will be. But the United States is running a high-stakes gamble. If the agreement fails, the United States will have no alternative but to strike conventionally, as fast and as hard and as comprehensively as possible. Once the two rogues are denuclearized, and America has shown that U.S. military force can defeat proliferation, the world will learn to live comfortably with controlled but unused nukes.

Extraordinarily high stakes ride on the pending denuclearization agreement with North Korea. And there is also an immense time-urgency about concluding the agreement far greater than almost anyone realizes. Here’s the situation. When two irresponsible and belligerent rogue states began determined crusades to acquire nuclear weapons ? North Korea in the 1990s and Iran a decade later ? there was no global nonproliferation regime left to oppose them. Hand-wringing, tame diplomacy and unenforceable sanctions were the best the world could muster. These were no match for the persistence of the two rogues. At any point in the following two decades, the United States could have easily denuclearized North Korea by military force (which would also have prevented Iran’s nuclear adventures); but American voters, after suffering the nuclear terror of four decades of Cold War, elected a generation of arms controllers and anti-nuclear activists as our national security leaders. It also allowed Iran to reach a nuclear weapons threshold, doubling the imminent threat the world faces. America has never understood that these two rogues are the harbingers of doom. Unless stopped, they will bring a world of nuclear horror and chaos. It’s not that they will use their new nukes that would be suicidal. It’s that North Korea will sell them to any buyer; and that Iran will give them to proxies for use. Many dozens of states, large and small, will have nukes. They’ll be everywhere, uncounted, uncontrolled, and in worldwide black markets. The globe will be dotted by radioactive, deserted, ruins of cities. And there’s no way back. The issue is clear. North Korea and Iran must not be permitted to acquire nukes.

When President Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, analysts warned that Iran’s crude oil production and exports could decline, forcing crude oil prices up. But one thing remains clear: The recent U.S. gas and oil boom will help fill any impending gaps in the global energy supply. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, U.S. crude oil production should grow to help meet or exceed demand over the long term, which means prices will likely stabilize at a reasonably affordable price. If the reimposed U.S. sanctions apply to Iranian oil production ? an issue that is as yet undecided ? daily global production could decline by 1 million barrels or more. And then there’s the failed state of Venezuela. The country currently produces about 1.4 million barrels per day, down from about 2.4 million a decade ago. And production continues to decline. Iran and Russia, and to a lesser extent Venezuela, use their oil revenues to help finance political mischief around the world. So cutting their oil revenues enhances global stability and peace. The good news is that the United States has the resources and the ability to fill the gap, and rising crude oil prices could serve as the catalyst to do so. But there’s more. Great Britain, and the European Union in general, has been reluctant to engage in fracking. That may be changing. Great Britain is considering allowing fracking. While this effort seems initially to be limited to natural gas, crude oil likely won’t be far behind. The price of crude oil will fluctuate, sometimes wildly. But high oil prices and low U.S. production costs mean Iranian and Venezuelan oil production declines can be replaced in the near future.

“One country, two systems” is the slogan, though it’s come under increasing strain over the past decade. Democracy in Hong Kong may be withering away as Beijing tightens its grip, but it’s not dead yet. June 4, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre passed quietly in the People’s Republic. Not only are memories of the massacre suppressed, but public protests are banned, and can be punished harshly. Hong Kong, the pebble in the shoe, is different. Not only was the anniversary marked, as it is every year, with a candlelight vigil, this week the streets have been thronged with protest of a proposed law that would enable Beijing to extradite criminal suspects from Hong Kong to be tried in mainland China, where the courts seem to be administered by kangaroos. Hong Kong saw the largest protest of China’s authority since Britain ceded control in 1997. Organizers estimated more than a million people demanded that Beijing shelve the law. “A snaking crowd that included young families, students, professionals and the elderly streamed through the city, reflecting unprecedented and widespread opposition to the latest move by Beijing to bring the former colony to heel,” The Wall Street Journal observed. “Critics say the proposed law could be abused to target political dissidents and would expose citizens to the mainland’s more opaque legal system, where detainees could be unfairly jailed and abused.” The proposed law would be, as many in Hong Kong argue, the final blow to “one country, two systems,” and begin in earnest the merging of Hong Kong’s free, open, accountable, and democratic system with Beijing’s Communist, corrupt, closed, and opaque dictatorship.

Hong Kong is the pebble in China’s shoe. The Beijing government didn’t try to swallow Hong Kong whole when the British gave up the ghost, and the colony, in 1997. The Beijing government, which seems to have a low opinion of its constituents, promotes the line that Chinese people are incapable of democratic government and they are not capable of the rule of law and consequently are not due the liberties and freedoms common in the West. Chastened by civil strife, poverty, and marinated over the centuries in Confucianism, the Chinese people gravitate toward autocracy, the communist line goes. Chi Wang, the president of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, described this earlier this year in an op-ed in the South China Morning Post as the idea that “it doesn’t seem that the nation could support a democracy. China lacks the ideological framework under which democracy could spontaneously develop or be fostered. Confucianism is inherently undemocratic; it encourages obedience, not freedom or personal liberty.” There’s a hole in this argument, created by Taiwan and Hong Kong. Those feisty enclaves of Chinese democracy give the lie to the self-serving notion that China will always be undemocratic. Taiwan and Hong Kong are living rebukes to Chinese president Xi Jinping’s vision of a forever oppressive Chinese state. Mr. Xi has makes no secret of his scheme to ultimately stamp out the embers of freedom in those enclaves. In recent days densely populated and prosperous Hong Kong and its 7 million residents, now technically part of the People’s Republic of China after the handover from the British in 1997, still maintain a semblance of an independent economic and political system.

A team of researchers from Maryland say they’ve invented a general artificial intelligence way for machines to identify and process 3-D images that doesn’t require humans to go through the tedium of inputting specific information that accounts for each and every instance, scenario, difference, change and category that could crop up. This development will have the power to shape and change how everyone from police to retail marketers and medical professionals go about their daily business. Currently, neural networks, defined as those computing systems that are aimed at mimicking how humans think and make decisions, are only as good as the information that’s inputted. But seriously, that information has to get quite specific; it has to account for each and every circumstance that could come, or else face system failure. Enter ZAC. ZAC, for Z Advanced Computing Inc., is bringing general artificial intelligence to the 3-D world. “We have figured out how to apply General-AI to Machine Learning, for the first time in history,” said ZAC executives. Retailers trying to snag online customers can market, advertise and showcase their products with a variety of descriptors, in a variety of angles, and add in new merchandise without having to reprogram the entire system ? and buyers, meanwhile, will be able to search on specific terms that will direct them right toward the products they’re actually seeking. That’s just retail. Think medical applications; national security and law enforcement. What if doctors could simply upload 3-D images of their patients and receive speedy identification of diseases? Or police, scanning crowds for suspects, could input photos of faces for quick, even real-time alerts?

There will be no ceremonies in mainland China to mark the dark days of June 1989 when Beijing brutally crushed the rebellion. No one will lament the loss of life ? not unless he wants to put his own in danger. The names of the dead won’t be spoken, at least not publicly. And to a large extent, not even privately. That’s because of the second thing Chinese leaders are using to prevent new protests: Technology. A recent Agence France-Presse article detailed just how thoroughly monitored the Chinese people are in 2019. Cameras are everywhere. Police booths have sprouted block by block nationwide. Websites that aren’t government-approved are blocked. Officials use artificial intelligences and facial recognition to keep tabs on suspected troublemakers. “Enhanced surveillance technology makes it much more difficult to see any mass demonstrations like the Tiananmen protests in 1989 to happen nowadays,” Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, told AFP. But Chinese officials aren’t simply watching everyone like a hawk. They’re engaging in some of the worst human-rights abuses in the world. Three decades after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, it’s obvious that conditions have gotten much tougher for the people of China. It’s easy to see why some consider a recurrence of the 1989 protests “impossible,” to quote Li Datong, a former editor at Beijing Youth Daily. The thirst for freedom is a powerful force. Fear can’t last forever. People can get so fed up, they’ll even face down a line of tanks. Then the rulers are really in trouble.

Even if you know nothing about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you’ve almost surely seen the famous photo of a man facing down a line of tanks, defiantly blocking their path. Doing so took even more courage than you may imagine. When that brave man, who has never been identified, made his stand 30 years ago this month, the Communist government in Beijing had already slaughtered hundreds of his countrymen. It began almost two months earlier when former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. He had supported reforms that helped bring economic opportunity and some political reforms to China, but hardline party members forced him out. Tens of thousands of students, workers and civilians filled the streets of Beijing in the wake of Yaobang’s death. On May 13, they began a hunger strike. “After the hunger strike, the student movement transformed into a country of political protest with a lot of other groups like workers and especially intellectuals,” student leader Wang Dan said 20 years later. “That made our government very scared.” It all came to a head in those early June days, when soldiers and tanks put down the rebellion. Did the Chinese government learn its lesson? Yes. Too bad it was the wrong lesson. What they learned is that dissent must be snuffed out long before it flowers into a protest movement. Two things enable them to do that. One is a technique as old as communism itself: Erase the past. How successful have they been? Consider the fact that, all these years later, a Chinese newspaper accidentally ran a photo from the massacre, not realizing what it was. Nobody recognized what this was. So they didn’t realize they should censor it.

In the short-term, we are concerned with having the north comply with nuclear inspections; in the long term, we must get them to open up because this will cut short the life-span of totalitarianism.” Nixon continued, “The north is an outlaw nation. It is unacceptable for it to have nuclear weapons. This is an issue of the highest priority for the United States, and it should be for China because China is also a nuclear power and should not welcome any other regional power getting the weapons. We all have differences as tough economic competitors. Each country, however, must be concerned with proliferation, especially in North Korea.” In Beijing, Nixon reiterated the point to Premier Li Peng and pressed him to rein in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. He was met with stony denial from Mr. Li. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In his final book, published in 1994, Nixon wrote, “Of the three remaining communist states (apart from China), North Korea remains a serious, active threat, not only to South Korea but to the peace and security of the entire Pacific Rim. Until it ceases to be a threat, we should continue to treat it as the pariah nation that its leaders still persist in making it.” Given the very different strategic and economic landscape of today, Mr. Trump is gambling on a different approach. If his policy of cautious engagement succeeds in ultimately delivering a denuclearizing North Korea, an official end to the Korean War and a budding free market North Korean economy, he will have pulled off the near-impossible. It’s a tall order. But recall that the opening to China was a tall order, too, and yet the president who ended the war in the nation that hosted Mr. Trump pulled that off.